Pete Seeger, the singer, folk-song collector and songwriter who spearheaded
an American folk revival and spent a long career championing folk music as both
a vital heritage and a catalyst for social change, died Monday. He was 94 and
lived in Beacon, N.Y.

His death was confirmed by his grandson, Kitama Cahill Jackson, who said he died
of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10 to
college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of
Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s)
to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for
Barack Obama.

For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where
he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.

In his hearty tenor, Mr. Seeger, a beanpole of a man who most often played
12-string guitar or five-string banjo, sang topical songs and children’s songs,
humorous tunes and earnest anthems, always encouraging listeners to join in. His
agenda paralleled the concerns of the American left: He sang for the labor
movement in the 1940s and 1950s, for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War
rallies in the 1960s, and for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and
beyond. “We Shall Overcome,” which Mr. Seeger adapted from old spirituals,
became a civil rights anthem.

Mr. Seeger was a prime mover in the folk revival that transformed popular music
in the 1950s. As a member of the Weavers, he sang hits including Lead Belly’s
“Goodnight, Irene” — which reached No. 1 — and “If I Had a Hammer,” which he
wrote with the group’s Lee Hays. Another of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “Where Have All
the Flowers Gone?,” became an antiwar standard. And in 1965, the Byrds had a No.
1 hit with a folk-rock version of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” Mr. Seeger’s setting of a
passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Mr. Seeger was a mentor to younger folk and topical singers in the ‘50s and
‘60s, among them Bob Dylan, Don McLean and Bernice Johnson Reagon, who founded
Sweet Honey in the Rock. Decades later, Bruce Springsteen drew the songs on his
2006 album, “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions,” from Mr. Seeger’s
repertoire of traditional music about a turbulent American experience, and in
2009 he performed Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” with Mr. Seeger at
the Obama inaugural. At a Madison Square Garden concert celebrating Mr. Seeger’s
90th birthday, Mr. Springsteen introduced him as “a living archive of America’s
music and conscience, a testament of the power of song and culture to nudge
history along.”

Although he recorded more than 100 albums, Mr. Seeger distrusted commercialism
and was never comfortable with the idea of stardom. He invariably tried to use
his celebrity to bring attention and contributions to the causes that moved him,
or to the traditional songs he wanted to preserve.

Mr. Seeger saw himself as part of a continuing folk tradition, constantly
recycling and revising music that had been honed by time.

During the McCarthy era Mr. Seeger’s political affiliations, including
membership in the Communist Party in the 1940s, led to his being blacklisted and
later indicted for contempt of Congress. The pressure broke up the Weavers, and
Mr. Seeger disappeared from television until the late 1960s. But he never
stopped recording, performing and listening to songs from ordinary people.
Through the decades, his songs have become part of America’s folklore.

“My job,” he said in 2009, “is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this
world, and if used right it may help to save the planet.”

Peter Seeger was born on May 3, 1919, to Charles Seeger, a musicologist, and
Constance de Clyver Edson Seeger, a concert violinist. His parents later
divorced.

He began playing the ukulele while attending Avon Old Farms, a private boarding
school in Connecticut. His father and his stepmother, the composer Ruth Crawford
Seeger, were collecting and transcribing rural American folk music, as were
folklorists like John and Alan Lomax. He heard the five-string banjo, which
would become his main instrument, when his father took him to a square-dance
festival in North Carolina.

Young Pete became enthralled by rural traditions. “I liked the strident vocal
tone of the singers, the vigorous dancing,” he is quoted in “How Can I Keep From
Singing,” a biography by David Dunaway. “The words of the songs had all the meat
of life in them. Their humor had a bite, it was not trivial. Their tragedy was
real, not sentimental.”

Planning to be a journalist, Mr. Seeger attended Harvard, where he founded a
radical newspaper and joined the Young Communist League. After two years, he
dropped out and came to New York City, where Mr. Lomax introduced him to the
blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly. Mr. Lomax also helped Mr.
Seeger find a job cataloging and transcribing music at the Archive of American
Folk Song at the Library of Congress.

Mr. Seeger met Mr. Guthrie, a songwriter who shared his love of vernacular music
and agitprop ambitions, in 1940, when they performed at a benefit concert for
migrant California workers. Traveling across the United States with Mr. Guthrie,
Mr. Seeger picked up some of his style and repertory. He also hitchhiked and
hopped freight trains by himself, trading and learning songs.

When he returned to New York later in 1940, Mr. Seeger made his first albums.
He, Millard Lampell and Mr. Hays founded the Almanac Singers, who performed
union songs and, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union, antiwar songs,
following the Communist Party line. Mr. Guthrie soon joined the group.

During World War II the Almanac Singers’s repertory turned to patriotic,
antifascist songs, bringing them a broad audience, including a prime-time
national radio spot. But the group’s earlier antiwar songs, the target of an
F.B.I. investigation, came to light, and the group’s career plummeted.

Before the group completely dissolved, however, Mr. Seeger was drafted in 1942
and assigned to a unit of performers. He married Toshi-Aline Ohta while on
furlough in 1943.

When he returned from the war he founded People’s Songs Inc., which published
political songs and presented concerts for several years before going bankrupt.
He also started his nightclub career, performing at the Village Vanguard in
Greenwich Village. Mr. Seeger and Paul Robeson toured with the campaign of Henry
Wallace, the Progressive Party presidential candidate, in 1948.

Mr. Seeger invested $1,700 in 17 acres of land overlooking the Hudson River in
Beacon and began building a log cabin there in the late 1940s. In 1949, Mr.
Seeger, Mr. Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman started working together as
the Weavers. They were signed to Decca Records by Gordon Jenkins, the company’s
music director and an arranger for Frank Sinatra. With Mr. Jenkins’s elaborate
orchestral arrangements, the group recorded a repertoire that stretched from “If
I Had a Hammer” to a South African song, “Wimoweh” (the title was Mr. Seeger’s
mishearing of “Mbube,” the name of a South African hit by Solomon Linda), to an
Israeli soldiers’ song, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena,” to a cleaned-up version of Lead
Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene.” Onstage, they also sang more pointed topical songs.

In 1950 and 1951 the Weavers were national stars, with hit singles and
engagements at major nightclubs. Their hits included “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”
and Mr. Guthrie’s “So Long (It’s Been Good to Know Yuh),” and they sold an
estimated four million singles and albums.

But “Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet listing performers with suspected
Communist ties, appeared in June 1950 and listed Mr. Seeger, although by then he
had quit the Communist Party. He would later criticize himself for having not
left the party sooner, though he continued to describe himself as a “communist
with a small ‘c.’ ”

Despite the Weavers’ commercial success, by the summer of 1951 the “Red
Channels” citation and leaks from F.B.I. files had led to the cancellation of
television appearances. In 1951, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
investigated the Weavers for sedition. And in February 1952, a former member of
People’s Songs testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that
three of the four Weavers were members of the Communist Party.

As engagements dried up the Weavers disbanded, though they reunited periodically
in the mid-1950s. After the group recorded an advertisement for Lucky Strike
cigarettes, Mr. Seeger left, citing his objection to promoting tobacco use.

Shut out of national exposure, Mr. Seeger returned primarily to solo concerts,
touring college coffeehouses, churches, schools and summer camps, building an
audience for folk music among young people. He started to write a long-running
column for the folk-song magazine Sing Out! And he recorded prolifically for the
independent Folkways label, singing everything from children’s songs to Spanish
Civil War anthems.

In 1955 he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, where
he testified, “I feel that in my whole life I have never done anything of any
conspiratorial nature.” He also stated: “I am not going to answer any questions
as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political
beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I
think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially
under such compulsion as this.”

Mr. Seeger offered to sing the songs mentioned by the congressmen who questioned
him. The committee declined.

Mr. Seeger was indicted in 1957 on 10 counts of contempt of Congress. He was
convicted in 1961 and sentenced to a year in prison, but the next year an
appeals court dismissed the indictment as faulty. After the indictment, Mr.
Seeger’s concerts were often picketed by the John Birch Society and other
rightist groups. “All those protests did was sell tickets and get me free
publicity,” he later said. “The more they protested, the bigger the audiences
became.”

By then, the folk revival was prospering. In 1959, Mr. Seeger was among the
founders of the Newport Folk Festival. The Kingston Trio’s version of Mr.
Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” reached the Top 40 in 1962, soon
followed by Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “If I Had a Hammer,” which rose to
the Top 10.

Mr. Seeger was signed to a major label, Columbia Records, in 1961, but he
remained unwelcome on network television. “Hootenanny,” an early-1960s show on
ABC that capitalized on the folk revival, refused to book Mr. Seeger, causing
other performers (including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary) to
boycott it. “Hootenanny” eventually offered to present Mr. Seeger if he would
sign a loyalty oath. He refused.

He toured the world, performing and collecting folk songs, in 1963, and returned
to serenade civil rights advocates, who had made a rallying song of his “We
Shall Overcome.”

Like many of Mr. Seeger’s songs, “We Shall Overcome” had convoluted traditional
roots. It was based on old gospel songs, primarily “I’ll Overcome,” a hymn that
striking tobacco workers had sung on a picket line in South Carolina. A slower
version, “We Will Overcome,” was collected from one of the workers, Lucille
Simmons, by Zilphia Horton, the musical director of the Highlander Folk School
in Monteagle, Tenn., which trained union organizers.

Ms. Horton taught it to Mr. Seeger, and her version of “We Will Overcome” was
published in the People’s Songs newsletter. Mr. Seeger changed “We will” to “We
shall” and added verses (“We’ll walk hand in hand”). He taught it to the singers
Frank Hamilton, who would join the Weavers in 1962, and Guy Carawan, who became
musical director at Highlander in the ‘50s. Mr. Carawan taught the song to the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at its founding convention.

The song was copyrighted by Mr. Seeger, Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Carawan and Ms.
Horton. “At that time we didn’t know Lucille Simmons’s name,” Mr. Seeger wrote
in his 1993 autobiography, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” All of the song’s
royalties go to the “We Shall Overcome” Fund, administered by what is now the
Highlander Research and Education Center, which provides grants to
African-Americans organizing in the South.

Along with many elders of the protest-song movement, Mr. Seeger felt betrayed
when Bob Dylan appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a loud electric
blues band. Reports emerged that Mr. Seeger had tried to cut the power cable
with an ax, but witnesses including the producer George Wein and the festival’s
production manager, Joe Boyd (later a leading folk-rock record producer), said
he did not go that far. (An ax was available, however. A group of prisoners had
used it while singing a logging song.)

As the United States grew divided over the Vietnam War, Mr. Seeger wrote “Waist
Deep in the Big Muddy,” an antiwar song with the refrain “The big fool says to
push on.” He performed the song during a taping of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour” in September 1967, his return to network television, but it was cut before
the show was broadcast. After the Smothers Brothers publicized the censorship,
Mr. Seeger returned to perform the song for broadcast in February 1968.

During the late 1960s Mr. Seeger started an improbable project: a sailing ship
that would crusade for cleaner water on the Hudson River. Between other benefit
concerts he raised money to build the Clearwater, a 106-foot sloop that was
launched in June 1969 with a crew of musicians. The ship became a symbol and a
rallying point for antipollution efforts and education.

In May 2009, after decades of litigation and environmental activism led by Mr.
Seeger’s nonprofit environmental organization, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater,
General Electric began dredging sediment containing PCBs it had dumped into the
Hudson. Mr. Seeger and his wife also helped organize a yearly summer folk
festival named after the Clearwater.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s Mr. Seeger toured regularly with Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son,
and continued to lead singalongs and perform benefit concerts. Recognition and
awards arrived. He was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972, and in
1993 he was given a lifetime achievement Grammy Award. In 1994, President Bill
Clinton handed him the National Medal of Arts, America’s highest arts honor,
given by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999, he traveled to Cuba to
receive the Order of Félix Varela, Cuba’s highest cultural award, for his
“humanistic and artistic work in defense of the environment and against racism.”

In 1996, Mr. Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early
influence. Arlo Guthrie, who paid tribute at the ceremony, mentioned that the
Weavers’ hit “Goodnight, Irene” reached No. 1, only to add, “I can’t think of a
single event in Pete’s life that is probably less important to him.” Mr. Seeger
made no acceptance speech, but he did lead a singalong of “Goodnight, Irene,”
flanked by Stevie Wonder, David Byrne and members of the Jefferson Airplane.

Mr. Seeger won Grammy Awards for best traditional folk album in 1997, for the
album “Pete,” and in 2009, for the album “At 89.” He also won a Grammy in the
children’s music category in 2011 for “Tomorrow’s Children.”

Mr. Seeger kept performing into the 21st century, despite a flagging voice;
audiences happily sang along more loudly. He celebrated his 90th birthday, on
May 3, 2009, at a Madison Square Garden concert — a benefit for Hudson River
Sloop Clearwater — with Mr. Springsteen, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Joan
Baez, Ani DiFranco, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Emmylou Harris and dozens of
other musicians paying tribute. In August he was back in Newport for the 50th
anniversary of the Newport Folk Festival.

Mr. Seeger’s wife, Toshi, died in 2013, days before the couple’s 70th
anniversary. Survivors include his son, Daniel; his daughters, Mika and Tinya; a
half-sister, Peggy; and six grandchildren, including the musician Tao
Rodriguez-Seeger, who performed with him at the Obama inaugural. His
half-brother Mike Seeger, a folklorist and performer who founded the New Lost
City Ramblers, died in 2009.

Through the years, Mr. Seeger remained determinedly optimistic. “The key to the
future of the world,” he said in 1994, “is finding the optimistic stories and
letting them be known.”